First, I will show you a quick snapshot of the traffic uplift, which yielded an additional 400,000 unique visitors from organic search traffic on a monthly basis. Then I will explain to you the steps in which we took to get the client to this level. I have also tried to keep this quite general so everyone can adapt their own situation to this case study.
Lee Wilson is head of enterprise SEO at Vertical Leap and has been leading digital marketing teams since the early 2000’s. He has headed up the SEO department for a top 10 leading search and digital agency (Vertical Leap) from 2010 to present. In 2016, he had his first solely authored industry book published (Tactical SEO – the theory and practice of search marketing).

One of the reasons for a traffic drop can also be due to your site losing links. You may be seeing a direct loss of that referral traffic, but there could also be indirect effects. When your site loses inbound links, it tells Google that your site isn't as authoritative anymore, which leads to lower search rankings that in turn lead to traffic drops (because fewer people are finding your site if it's not ranked as highly and more).

Yahoo Answers is one of my favorite traffic generation sources when it comes to answer sites. It has been one of my main traffic sources on a niche site for a long time, even after I haven’t used it for months. The main thing is to give your best when answering. If your answers are chosen as the best ones, you will have more respect in the eyes of the visitors so… yes, more of them will come to check out your blog.

The first step to digging into organic traffic is to analyze what content on your website is performing best in this area. For obvious reasons, the homepage is almost certainly the landing page for most organic traffic, but the other top pages are often revealing. To view this data, we’re going to head over to the Behaviour section in the Analytics sidebar, then choose Site Content and finally Landing Pages.

Brands hold a wealth of customer information that may often not seem applicable to SEO — and many times, it’s not. However, if you’re working with an SEO agency, sometimes sharing this knowledge can provide the missing piece to the puzzle. Knowing something as simple as “Consumer preferences are shifting around the color black” could help explain why your traffic is down if your products are often paired with black shoes. Sometimes it’s as easy as connecting the dots.

Brankica, Excellent list. The only one I could think of is mentioning through email to family and friends. Example: Hey Guys and Gals, Sorry I haven't been in touch for a while. I've been working my tail off building something I hope will be special. I would appreciate it if you could do me a huge favor. My blog is still new and I need some opinions on where it can improve. Let me know the good, bad and ugly:) Also, can you pass it along to some of your friends? The more opinions the better idea I have at what works and what doesn't. etc. Thanks for the post. Live it LOUD!

Reddit is also worth a special mention here. It’s a cross between a social network and a web forum, which is a traffic source we’ll discuss later. Reddit is one of the largest sites online, and the entire focus of the site is based around posting links and discussing the content of those links. A lot of the content you see trend on Facebook or Twitter is trending because Reddit got hold of it and started engaging with it. However, Reddit is a very tricky platform to use for marketing. You have to avoid approaching it like a marketer, because Reddit users are like piranhas. If they sense you trying to use their audience for money, they’ll swarm you and savage you until you feel like you can’t use the site again. Make sure to read up and take great care before trying to market on Reddit.
For our client: We rolled out a successful implementation of rel="author" for the three in-house content writers the company had. The client had over 300+ articles made by these content writers over the years and it was possible to implement rel="author" for all the aged articles. I advise anyone who has a large section of content to do so as it will only benefit the website. We were also in the process of rolling out further schema markup to the site's course content as it only has a benefit for CTR.

This community is full of opportunities if you're a fashion-based retailer. One of the major advantages is the fact that they add links to each of the products that they feature within their outfits - the links go directly to product pages. This is the holy grail for ecommerce SEO, and the traffic those links will bring through will convert at a very high rate.

Hey Peppy, I am glad you found this post too :) I wanted to write it in even more details but it was getting so long I thought if I add one more word, no one would read it, lol. I tried all these traffic generation sources, some worked miracles some were so and so. But I can bet everyone can find winners here. Actually all these sources can work miracles, it all depends on what you find more natural to do. I am for example really slow with videos and still not comfortable making them so YouTube doesn't bring thousands of people to my blog. It brings some. But when it comes to answer sites, I had so much success with some of them, that I just have to recommend them. Blog commenting is working better as I learn to write better titles, so people click on my Comment Luv links. Anyway, thanks so much for the great comment and hope to hear some feedback from you, about how there worked out on your blog.
Buy turkish search traffic visitors from Google.com.tr for 30 days – We will send real turkish visitors to your site using Google.com.tr's search field with your keywords to improve your SERP CTR and SEO strategy. All visitors will be shown as organic traffic in your Google Analytics. Having a constant in organic web traffic is imperative in order to maintain your rankings and minimize the risk of dropping in the SERP's. So, don't wait use our Google Türkiye Web Traffic Service today …
Hey Jym, thanks a bunch :) Yeah, I don't think everyone need to use each and every one of these, especially at the beginning. But I do find the list useful for those with "older" blogs. When you are thinking "Where else can I go to get more people to see my blog". That is what I do with my first website. Again, I agree with the part of identifying the ones that will work the best, so we don't spend too much time getting no results. Thanks so much for the comment
With the exception of crude oil and Picassos, very few industries are “recession-proof” and experience an inelastic product demand. Look at how your competitors are faring, and see if they’re experiencing the same problems. While you should take Google Trends data with a grain of salt, looking at the bigger picture may help provide some clarity. I’d suggest taking this a step further by conducting trends research and reading industry reports.
Would you mind sharing your stumbleupon user name with me? I would love to follow you and your shares! :) I am beginning to get more active on SU and it is definitely paying off. I have had a few posts in the last several weeks that have brought in 600-700 visits each. :) In regards to your "challenge" I am going to try out paper.li I will let you know how it goes.
This quickly turns into a “chicken-and-egg” situation. Are fewer people coming to your site due to poor visibility in the SERPs? Or have you shifted your product focus, and is that why consumers are no longer interested in your brand? For a quick check, look at Google Search Console data, and pull positions and clicks by page. If position is staying relatively stagnant, this means your brand is not losing visibility in the SERPs, and there may be a bigger issue at play.
When people hear organic/non-organic, they’d most likely envision the produce section at their local supermarket. Society has become not only aware but educated on the differences between the two and how it affects their personal lives. Although the familiarity with these options has grown significantly, many business owners are completely in the dark when it comes to organic vs. non-organic Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you have a business online or just a website that you’re looking to draw more attention to, read on to learn more about how to make the best, cost-effective decisions to boost your search engine ranking.

Hi there Brankica, Super WOW! You have a bunch of quality, very applicable listing here. I believe being present on these sites would mean alot of traffic and sales because these are targeted and well renowned sites. I bet I need a lot of hardwork to be present to these sites. And this hardwork pays! Thanks for sharing this entry of yours. This has been the greatest list I've ever read so far. Good job. Cheers, Kira Permunian

Hey there, I had to come back and post some updates. I tried your tips on my brand new blog and got following results. I have to say it is a brand new free wordpress site and I got it to have 30 daily visitors after only 5 days of following your advice. It's been 2 weeks that I am using the tips and I am up to 45 daily visitors.I also made my first money with that blog. Since I am a lot more active on Squidoo, I decided to try some of these ideas over there too, and I had my traffic double in only one week.Thanks and I will be back with more numbers and feedback how I made these traffic sources work for me.

Nice post. I was wondering if all this content of your strategy was been writien in blog of the site, or if you added to content in some other specific parts of the sites. I don't believe 100% in the strategy of reomoving links. If Google just penalize you taking into account your inbound likes, It would be so easy to attack your competitors just by buying dirty link packages targeting to their sites.

You can apply this to marketing in a few ways. If, for example, you purchase paid search advertising, you’ll want to make sure those “CPC” sources have generally low bounce rates. If a pay-per-click or cost-per-click campaign has a high bounce rate (1) check your landing page to make sure that it provides the content promised in your ad, (2) check your ad copy to ensure it is clear, and (3) check your keywords.
Before you say it – no, true guest blogging isn’t dead, despite what you may have heard. Securing a guest post on a reputable site can increase blog traffic to your website and help build your brand into the bargain. Be warned, though – standards for guest blogging have changed radically during the past eighteen months, and spammy tactics could result in stiff penalties.
Traffic from organic search is free and long-lasting, which makes you less dependent on advertising budgets. If you look at the list of the top three American e-commerce retailers, you will find that it matches the above data with the top three companies getting the most organic traffic. This definitely proves that SEO pays off in the long run: you attract quality traffic in large volumes without paying for it directly.
Hey Marcus, thank you so much. Hearing all the compliments make me wish I made a list of 100 traffic sources :) I don't think anyone would publish it though...too much work, lol. I hope everyone will use it and find some fresh traffic for their blogs, most of these sources will work for any blog but some will work better for specific niches. Thanks for sharing and appreciate the comment!

One of the things that makes social media a bit more attractive than search engine optimization is that you get to maintain a bit more control over your success. You can always find new ways of improving your strategy and you can learn from your mistakes and your wins so that you can improve your traffic in the future. The same can't really be said about SEO - although it's very clear what not to do, it's not always as clear exactly what strategies can help you improve your ranking.

What we look for in a list like this is to identify the pages that are performing well so we can continue to capitalize on those. In this example, we see that the inventory pages are getting significant traffic, which is great, but we also see that the Team page and the Service page are both also ranking well. With this information in mind, we should revisit these pages to ensure that they are structured with the right content to perform as the visitor’s first page view, possibly their first glimpse at your business.
People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.
The second major source of traffic for e-commerce sites is organic search, which is responsible for 32 percent of overall monthly traffic. Interestingly, while the ratio of search vs paid traffic for e-commerce websites is 20:1, the average ratio for all industries is 8:1 (87.17% search clicks and 13.23% paid clicks as of January 2018), which leaves room for growth of paid traffic for online retailers.
It works in a similar way as a canonical tag does to show when a duplicate version of a page exists. But in this case, it helps Google index local content easier within local search engines. It also helps to pass trust across sites and improve the way Google crawls these pages. To know more about how errors you should not make when it comes to hreflang tags, you can check our previous article.
Great article! SEM Rush's new ranking study of 600,000 search queries showed a positive correlation between direct traffic and top rankings. They indicated that Google prioritizes domains with authority and consequently more direct traffic when ranking websites in its search results. See their study here: https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/. So, direct traffic can be viewed as a positive ranking correlation.
The term “organic” refers to something having the characteristics of an organism. Although black hat SEO methods may boost a website’s search engine page rank in the short term, these methods could also get the site banned from the search engines altogether. However, it is more likely that readers will recognize the low quality of sites employing black hat SEO at the expense of the reader experience, which will reduce the site’s traffic and page rank over time.
To find the right people I downloaded a list of some of the most popular users within the community. To do this, I used Screaming Frog SEO Spider to gather a list of all the URLs on the website. I then exported this list into an Excel spreadsheet and filtered the URLs to only show those that were user profile pages. I could do this because all of the profile pages had /user/ within the URL.

Ezinearticles.com, although hit by the new Google algorithm, it is a great source of highly targeted traffic. The bounce rate of visitors I get from EZA is always less than 20%! Choosing a good keyword for an article can result in incredible amounts of traffic. I have been receiving a lot of traffic from a single well written article for a year and a half now!

If you want to drop from your hard worked #14 position to #79, you can start looking for companies that advertise themselves like the one in the image below. We don’t even know what to believe when it comes to companies that promise guaranteed instant traffic: that they are folly (in which case you don’t need them) or charlatans (in which case you don’t want them). If you want to find out more about SEO agencies and how they can ruin your website’s traffic, we wrote a previous blog post on this.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

We are here to give you the best web traffic you can get. We are experts in SEO methods and have been in this business for many years. We understand that our customers need to be our number one priority so one of our main objectives is to ensure the rapid growth of your website and to do everything to make your business more visible online.

Buy turkish search traffic visitors from Google.com.tr for 30 days – We will send real turkish visitors to your site using Google.com.tr's search field with your keywords to improve your SERP CTR and SEO strategy. All visitors will be shown as organic traffic in your Google Analytics. Having a constant in organic web traffic is imperative in order to maintain your rankings and minimize the risk of dropping in the SERP's. So, don't wait use our Google Türkiye Web Traffic Service today …
It's a little awkward, so we'll get straight to the point: This Monday we humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence. We depend on donations averaging about $16.36, but 99% of our readers don't give. If everyone reading this gave $3, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. The price of your Monday coffee is all we need. When we made Wikipedia a non-profit, people warned us we'd regret it. But if Wikipedia became commercial, it would be a great loss to the world. Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising. It unites all of us who love knowledge: contributors, readers and the donors who keep us thriving. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is a community of people working to bring you unlimited access to reliable, neutral information. Please take a minute to help us keep Wikipedia growing. Thank you.
Our alexa rank traffic service will increase your Alexa Rank in the United States! We will improve your current Alexa Rank for the United States, and that with a 100% money back guarantee if we fail. It is not important whether your site is currently listed or not. Alexa Rank is directly related to traffic coming to your site, so more quality traffic means getting higher Alexa Website Rank. Don't wait, increase your Alexa Rank with our Alexa Ranking Service today!
Good point,The thing with this client is they wanted to mitigate the risk of removing a large number of links so high quality link building was moved in early before keyword research. So it is on a case by case basis, but defiantly a good point for most new clients I work with who do not have pre-existing issues you want to do Keyword Research very early in the process.
Well, yes and no. Sure, you can get hit with an algorithm change or penalty that destroys all your traffic. However, if you have good people who know what they are doing, this is not likely to happen, and if it does, it is easy (in most cases) to get your visits back. Panda and Penguin are another story, but if you get hit by those it is typically not accidental.
Using the same 2 steps, we can also filter the All Pages section and the Content Drilldown to explore further how our organic traffic is using the site. A focus on this Organic Traffic is important because this traffic is, in many cases, free traffic that your website is receiving. Focus on doubling down on your pages that perform well and working to identify any pages that aren’t getting the organic traffic they deserve.
I just joined digg a few minutes ago. I gotta tell you that I have been researching on this topic for several months now. By far the best article I have come across on traffic generation. It's one of the most comprehensive ones I've read. And includes a variety of sources which never struck me before. I'm a musician and I plan on starting a blog and uploading videos soon. This is really going to help me a lot and I'm gonna follow. :) I really like the idea of using sites like wiki, about.com, scribd etc...
Plan your link structure. Start with the main navigation and decide how to best connect pages both physically (URL structure) and virtually (internal links) to clearly establish your content themes. Try to include at least 3-5 quality subpages under each core silo landing page. Link internally between the subpages. Link each subpage back up to the main silo landing page.